The first point—maintenance—has gone OK. Badly needed seismic retrofits, like rebuilding Yesler Bridge over 4th Avenue, have been completed on schedule, thank goodness.

But the more exciting parts of the project haven’t gone well, and might never happen. Mayor Jenny Durkan directed Seattle’s Department of Transportation (SDOT) to audit the project. The report isn’t promising.

Personally, I’m particularly worried about the RapidRide and Rainier corridor projects, which are the programs that would do me the most personal good. I ride the 7 more than any other bus, and I walk and drive on Rainier just about every day.

Rainier is the most dangerous and inefficient road in the city, and modernizing the street would save (or improve) the lives of plenty of people in South Seattle. Early returns on the project aren’t promising, and I doubt that, in a competition for scarce resources, the Rainier Valley project will win out over any in North Seattle.

The Rainier project alone could have been the centerpiece of a mayor’s transportation agenda. Any of the corridor redesigns could have. The idea of fixing 45th has bedeviled many Seattle mayors.

So Move Seattle is a complicated, ambitious project. That’s the problem. Move Seattle was way too ambitious, and the city just wasn’t up to the task.

The political leadership’s dysfunction could have been debilitating for Move Seattle on its own. But SDOT’s leader, Scott Kubly, had problems of his own.

Kubly botched the Pronto bikeshare program, and that ruined his tenure at SDOT. Kubly oversaw Pronto’s ill-fated existence—it failed and never met ridership goals. Also, Kubly awarded the company he used to lead the contract to run the bikeshare. Kubly didn’t report it, allegedly by accident (ed. note: right, sure), and was caught up in a 2016 ethics scandal that made him ineffective for the remaining two years of his tenure.

Of course, some of the cost overruns were unforeseeable. The prolonged construction boom has made contracting ever more expensive. Sound Transit has also run afoul of this problem, which has also hit the private sector. Any construction project is likely to go over budget.

But it seems like budgeting malpractice for a small project—a damn bike lane, not a subway station—to cost 1395% more than it was supposed to.

3. Vanishing federal funding

Move Seattle was a levy of local taxes, but it took for granted the idea that the Obama administration’s transit policies would continue. Obama was more pro-transit, biking, and walking— pro-city, in short—than even most Democratic presidents, and Republicans are almost uniformly anti-transit.

But Move Seattle is full of projects that depended on federal funding. Counting on that funding was a huge gamble, and massive infrastructure projects should not include gambles. Voters assume that initiatives include sure things: pay X dollars, get Y projects. Speculating on the availability of funding years down the road is misleading to voters.

So it was unwise for SDOT to promise projects that would depend on not-yet-approved federal funding for as much as 86 percent of their budget. Those projects should not have been folded into Move Seattle, because any project like that could vanish depending on the whims of Congress or the active administration.

So will we ever get this stuff?

We badly need all the projects in Move Seattle, but we’re not going to get all of them at this point.

The federal funding will not appear. The revised plan will likely be much less ambitious, because its accounting will include A) less magical thinking and B) construction estimates that reflect boom costs.

There’s also the problem of leadership. So far, Jenny Durkan has proven a better manager and administrator than Murray. That’s tremendously beneficial, and could limit the cost cutting damage to Move Seattle’s ambitious goals.

Move Seattle isn’t dead yet, but it’s going to fall short of what we all hoped it would be. Anyone in Seattle who values transit, multimodal transportation, and 21st century city planning would do well to learn from the Move Seattle fiasco.

Throwing a ton of money at sticky problems will not solve them. We should demand minutely detailed, scrupulously accounted transportation plans going forward. We should also demand competent leadership when any project is under construction.

Yes, transit projects face an unfair burden of proof. Plenty of voters think that transit is a waste of money, period. Even when a transit project is funded and under way, it will face intransigence and concern trolling. Some hardcore drivers will always have their knives out for any kind of transit project they do not understand or approve of, and will ignore all the data and lived experience that proves them wrong.

But when transit projects waste money, as with Move Seattle, or have shady accounting, as with Sound Transit’s car tab fiasco, those voters and opponents are proved right.

Transit advocates can’t keep making excuses for bad planning and half-baked projects. If we continue to do so, we will not get the projects Seattle and Puget Sound desperately need.